By News Reporters
Exemplar have suggested a new name for the street that will run through the heart of their mixed-use scheme on the development site currently known as Fitzroy Place.
The name “Pearson Square” has been chosen, named after John Loughborough Pearson the architect of the Grade II* listed hospital chapel at the centre of the site and the only part of the former Middlesex Hospital to escape total demolition.
The name “Pearson Square” has been formally suggested to Westminster Council who will have to decide on its suitability. The previous name of Fitzroy Place was withdrawn by Exemplar after objections were lodged by the postal authorities and the emergency services.
If approved by Westminster Council, the distinctive City of Westminster signs with Pearson Square W1 will be fixed to the three pedestrian entrances into the central courtyard of the completed site.
John Loughborough Pearson was a resident of Marylebone and there is a London County Council blue plaque on his former home in Mansfield Street. He was recognised by RIBA in 1880 with a gold award and was known for his work on Truro Cathedral, Bristol Cathedral and Westminster Hall. John died before the chapel was built and the responsibility was passed to his architect son Frank Loughborough Pearson to oversee its completion.
Exemplar told Fitzrovia News: “We would be proud to name our new square Pearson Square. We will be recognising a great local, and reverent man in a development which finally gives his previously hidden work a public setting.”
As part of the planning conditions there will also be a plaque placed inside the chapel commemorating the Middlesex Hospital which stood on the site from 1757 until its closure in 2005 and demolition in 2008.
The eight new buildings of retail, offices and housing, surrounding the first new public square in central London for over 100 years, are due to be completed by December 2014.
The chapel is nice enough I suppose, but the century-ago religiosity it represents has little to do with today’s Fitzrovia. Much more appropriate would to name it after someone whose dogged dedication over the last half century has helped prevent the whole of Fitzrovia from being covered with such horrendous community-destroying developments, and this one from being quite as bad as it might have been. So Max Neufeld Plaza. Can we start a campaign?
– Dave Ferris
He’s not dead yet.
Happily. I know. And? There’s a Mandela Street in Camden Town.
How does Fitzroy Place “destroy communities”? Which communities do you think that Fitzroy Place has “destroyed”, and why?
And this “Max Neufeld”? Why not start your own “campaign?”?
There’s the Fitzrovia community for a start, and though battered by developments like this it’s not yet destroyed. I suggest you visit the neighbourhood and have a look.
The Middlesex Hospital provided a vital service to all in the local community, employment for local people, and custom for local shops and businesses. The site at the very centre of Fitzrovia could have provided a substantial number of homes which local people could afford to live in to replace those which have progressively disappeared, and/or community amenities, like, say (my favourite vision), a new Central London square with space for allotments and play-space for children which the sun would reach. Instead the new development consists overwhelmingly of luxury housing, being sold “off-plan” to people who are mostly thousands of miles away from being local, for millions of pounds as an investment to put their obscene wealth into, or for a second or fifth pied a terre should they ever wish to visit London.
As for recognition of the achievements of “this” Max Neufeld, I would prefer it to be a communal campaign, and not an individualistic one.
Dave Ferris said: “There’s the Fitzrovia community for a start, and though battered by developments like this it’s not yet destroyed. I suggest you visit the neighbourhood and have a look.”
Let me get this right.
The community that you previously said has been “covered with such horrendous community-destroying developments” is – you say – Fittzrovia… and yet you now say that “it’s not yet destroyed”?
Which is it?
Destroyed or not?
I suggest you read what I said. Which was that Max Neufeld’s efforts “has helped prevent the whole of Fitzrovia from being covered with such horrendous community-destroying developments.”
The hospital’s “horrendous community-destroying development” is going ahead, but how exactly Max’s efforts to “prevent” other “community-destroying developments” have worked remain elusive.
Peter Foster – Max Neufeld’s efforts over many years have been well documented in the Fitzrovia News and elsewhere, and are not the least bit elusive to anyone capable of reading. You have been tediously obtuse, so consider exchange ended.
“Exemplar have suggested a new name for the street that will run through the heart of their mixed-use scheme on the development site currently known as Fitzroy Place”
To whom have Exemplar suggested this? And when?
We always thought that Nightingale Square would be right, after Florence Nightingale who began her great work for nursing at the Middlesex Hospital. And she is a woman too…..
I think it should reflect the Middlesex Hospital e.g. Middlesex Place which stood on the site for decades and was well loved by many people.